Interviews

The Alternate History of Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs

We talk with Bruce Shelley about history, stereotypes and Native Americans in the expansion pack for Age of Empires III.

In October 2005, a tired Bruce Shelley was on the last leg of a world tour promoting the upcoming release of Age of Empires III, the blockbuster sequel to the immensely successful real-time strategy series. It was during that tour that I met with him in San Francisco for an interesting discussion about the perils and pitfalls of historical accuracy. The meat of our conversation was the development team's difficult decision to not include any Native American tribes as playable empires in a game set in Colonial America, but instead have them available as indestructible "map resources" that the player could make trade agreements with and hire as mercenary forces.

Nearly a year later, Ensemble is readying the inevitable expansion pack for Age of Empires III for release. The WarChiefs, due out this October, immediately stands out for one reason: the inclusion of three Native American tribes as playable empires. The WarChiefs will add the Iroquois, Sioux and Aztec nations to the game, each modeled with Ensemble's customary attention to historical verisimilitude. Why the change, though? Why choose to focus the expansion pack on the Native American experience this time around, and how did the development team decide how they would be represented? We recently spoke with Shelley about the expansion pack and why American Indians are back in a big way.

America's Founding Fathers

"We're game makers, first and foremost," Shelley began as we started our conversation. "We never deliberately sit down and try to make any kind of 'statement' with our games." Shelley echoed our earlier conversation when he said that when The WarChiefs' team began brainstorming ideas for the next expansion pack, there was never any particular emphasis given to the idea of focusing on Native American tribes beyond the fact that it sounded like a lot of fun to be able to play Age of Empires III from a different perspective. In fact, the idea of making the expansion all about the Native American was only one of several ideas that the team kicked around. They thought about pushing the game forward and adding in post-Revolution Americans, "Imperial conflicts" between the Mexican and American empires or even going as far as the Civil War. In the end, the team kept coming back to the Native Americans.

"It just worked on a lot of levels," Shelley said. "From a development standpoint, the narrower scope meant that we could finish the expansion pack in a reasonable amount of time. From a marketing standpoint, the focus on Native Americans makes a great bullet point. It isn't something's that's been done like this before and is very different from everything else that's out there. Most importantly, it let our game designers create a lot of interesting new units, buildings and racial abilities that would deepen the strategic experience. We could have added more European nations, but this way it really stands out. It really wasn't any more complicated than that."

Except that it was. Representing the Native American experience in Colonial America is rife with pitfalls. The interpretation of history in an entertainment product, especially one as fraught with conflict, tragedy and clashing interpretations as this, is always a dicey prospect. It was precisely to avoid that that Ensemble worked closely with a group of Native American employees at Microsoft during the development of the original game and came up with the compromise representation. According to Shelley, this collaboration was so successful and the committee so happy that even he was surprised by how amenable they were when it came to The WarChiefs. "We continue to get expert opinion and do tons of research so that we portray these cultures as accurately as possible, but by and large, everyone's been pretty happy with the way The WarChiefs is coming out. In fact, the biggest complaint about The WarChiefs so far is from those whose cultures aren't represented."